Why You Should Attend The Next Data Driven Workshop

Being data-driven isn't simply about gathering data. Most importantly, it's choosing the right KPIs to measure and becoming data-informed to take action.

Last week, BrightGauge hosted our 4th Data Driven Workshop. It covered getting the most out of BrightGauge's top features, the basics of SQL, some extreme gauge building, and one-on-one sessions where attendees got hands-on training from one of our data experts. Plus there were lots of croquetas and cafecito.

As a first time attendee myself, it was great to have some of our customers in our offices (plus a couple of newcomers) and to see firsthand how everyone uses BrightGauge a little differently. Plus, I learned a few new tricks to help me BrightGauge like a pro.

To recap my experience, I'd like to share some of the top things I learned in each of our workshop sessions. By the end, you'll get why this workshop is a must for those wanting to build their BrightGauge foundation and become more data-driven.

Setting Goals for Your Business

This was the most asked about portion of our workshop. For a great overview of how BrightGauge Goals work, watch this video.

The Basics of SQL

Easy to learn, hard to master. The gist of it comes in understanding SELECT, FROM, and WHERE.

SELECT allows you to select specific fields within tables that you want to represent within your Query. FROM helps you pinpoint exactly which tables will be referenced for the fields you are pulling. WHERE sets specific filters in place. These filters then allow you to limit the data that is pulled in. More on this soon!

Gauge Building

The key is to not start from scratch if you don't have to. BrightGauge has put a lot of time into building out-of-the-box template gauges, dashboards, and reports for you to begin visualizing your data instantly.

When considering creating a new gauge, first check to see what's available. If you’re looking for a time entry gauge, start searching by time or something similar and then try to modify it rather than create a new one. For example, search by "time this week" and apply a filter to modify it.

Extreme Gauge Building

This is best left to the experts 🤓

Always reach out to our support team for any gauges you'd like built. While we put a lot of pride into the work that goes into making our app great, the true stars behind making BrightGauge work for you is our support team. Any question you may have, any gauge you'd like to have built, our support team of data expertsis always standing by to help.

Other Top Tips From The Workshop

Choosing the right dataset to work with is key

I came across this quite a bit when I spent a week working in our support queue. A lot of tickets that claimed missing data were attributed to the use of the wrong dataset. This is especially common with our "Statistics Last X Amount of Days" and "Statistics Lite" datasets. You choose the Lite dataset for working with information that's more time sensitive, and that comes with faster sync times.

If you're not sure what's included in your dataset, look at the right hand column in the gauge builder and click on the dataset name. Doing so will pull up a drilldown of all fields that come with that dataset.

Understanding dashboard sync frequency

Datasets sync at midnight or once a gauge in that dataset is loaded up in a dashboard. If you already viewed that gauge or dataset, leave, and come back to it in an hour, the data will remain the same. The only way this changes is if you have a scheduled report. All gauges in that report will refresh 10 minutes before it goes out. Keep in mind that if one gauge refreshes, the whole dataset that it's a part of syncs up as well.

Mashup datasources in Reports

Since our customers could use any combination of datasources, we don't try to guess what mashup of these you'd like in a report. So while none of our templates offer a preset mashup of options, this isn't impossible. If you need help putting yours together, our support team would be happy to help.

Report scheduling

If your workday ends at 5, schedule your daily or weekly report to go out an hour later. Otherwise, using this example, it will only sync up until 4, the hour before the report is set to go out.

See where all of your gauges are in use

We've built a nifty usage tab into your gauge builder to show where the gauge you're viewing is in use. This is especially helpful for when you're looking to modify or delete a gauge you think is no longer needed. Why is this important? Once a gauge has been edited, it's applied across all instances where that gauge is in use. So if you're not going to look at the usage tab first, your safest bet is to just copy & make a new gauge, then modify from there.